[Urbane Guerrilla]

Something tw is not yet aware of is that nothing done north of the Rio Grande is actually striking at the root of the problem: that Mexico's economy less resembles that of the United States than it does that of medieval Spain, whose own economic development was stunted by the Reconquista's centuries of warfare which absorbed energies that might otherwise have gone to developing and creating wealth, and whose development after 1492 was poisoned by such a flood of New World gold as to cause gold itself to suffer inflation, especially on the Iberian peninsula. Latin America's economies were all built on the Spanish model of great estates owned by the wealthy few and leaving practically the entire remainder of the population as landless tenant farmers and workers, poverty-stricken, with little stake in the economy and next to no incentive to improve or develop it, because their property rights such as they were were not secure, and they got no profit nor benefit from devising improvement. It is difficult to see how the Spanish colonists could have come up with a better economic model than the one they implemented, it being the only one these landholding, noble hidalgos had any experience of. It didn't help at all that the great majority of the Spanish colonists were either petty nobility or not so petty, would-be nobility and younger sons, and all trying to set themselves up as estateholders, all the while having very few people trying to get from Spain to the New World for the purpose of bettering themselves, such as the English-language colonies further north had.

Want our immigration problems to go away? Make a Mexican middle class you can see without a microscope. This is at least 99% of the problem. We ourselves have very little "part in creating the problem." It grew naturally from Mexico's five-century-long screwup.